The extreme bias of the New York Times in 2016 toward Hillary Clinton clearly cost her the election and many Democrats are wary that it will do the same to Kamala Harris. But they need to understand why the Times has such outsized influence on American politics.
It's not because ordinary people read the Times; they don't. But every person in the country who belongs to the elite, by any definition of the term, does read it. This is especially so for the media. All reporters and editors everywhere read it and take their cues from it.
It's similar to the bias toward hiring people with Ivy League credentials--no one in HR ever got fired because they hired someone with an Ivy League degree, no matter how incompetent. Same with the Times. No reporter parroting the Times line on a news event ever suffered for it.
This is the secret to the Times' power--its coverage has a ripple effect throughout the media, which has gotten stronger as lesser media have been forced by economic necessity to cut back on their own reportage. They are forced to rely on the Times for coverage of many things.
The real power of the Times on other media is establishing priorities--what is news and what isn't. The Times clearly has the power to make nothingburgers, such as Hillary's emails, into those that all media must cover. It can also bury stories, as it has often done for Trump.
Its comprehensiveness is its defense. If one asks why a certain story wasn't covered, it can always find an article or op-ed where is was covered--once and only once, and henceforth buried. Implicitly, the Times acts as if every article it's ever published was read by everyone.
The Times' constant repetition of certain stories or lack of such coverage on others constitutes bias. But it's hard to find bias in any individual story. It's the sheer repetition of stories that should have been dropped that constitutes the bias.
There is a certain Times' methodology that also constitutes de facto bias. That is the widely criticized policy of implying that both sides are equally guilty of some action or intellectual wrongdoing.
Quite often, one side's minor misdemeanor is equated with the other side's first-degree murder, as if all lawbreaking is equally wrong. The law itself doesn't say so and the Times shouldn't either. Unfortunately, the bothsidesism disease has spread throughout the media.
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